There are many contenders for the title of worst sports book ever. But I reckon Sal Paolantonio's just-published How Football Explains America has to be a serious contender. A belated response to Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains the World, Paolantonio's cocksure parochialism is embodied in the very title. Foer argues that soccer can be used to explain an entire planet. Paolantonio — while beating his chest, waving old Glory and strutting like a cockerel — boasts that American football can be used to explain why one corner of it is, like, awesome. The contraction in scope and ambition tells all. One hopes other authors pursue this logic further. How Welly Wanging Explains West Yorkshire. How Bog Snorkelling Explains Llanwrtyd Wells. How Lying on the Couch Reading This Crap Book Explains My Living Room. How My Cat Sylvie Explains My Stomach. The possibilities are endless. The actual chapters of How Football Explains America are all but unreadable. Paolantonio rehashes a game or a heartwarming football-related anecdote with the gusto of the true bore. Then he explains why this explains how football explains the battle of Midway. Or Davy Crockett. Or manifest destiny. Each chapter more tedious than the last. The prologue is a masterpiece of bombastic ignorance in which Paolantonio inadvertently reveals that he has apparently never actually watched any other sport. Or indeed read about them. "Go ahead, you try going to a rugby game and writing about it. Soccer? Ninety minutes of whatever and then maybe one goal scored by accident. Tough to create a coherent narrative out of that." It gets worse. Paolantonio is the sports journalism equivalent of the saloon bar patriot who doesn't actually own a passport. His errors are legion. He compares American football to the hoplite tactics of the ancient Greeks, and soccer to the Persian cavalry armies the Greeks defeated. In fact American football is more like the territory-hogging "linear second-generation" warfare of WWI; while fluid, flowing soccer is akin to the "non-linear fourth-generation" guerilla warfare US forces faced in Vietnam and Iraq (which is why anybody with a brain in the Pentagon is urging that US soldiers think more like soccer players and less like American footballers, meaning that American football explains nothing about modern warfare — except how to lose at it). In the same intro we learn from Paolantonio that soccer is so boring that fans have to start fights and embrace fascism just to stay awake and that a founding principle of American football is "relinquishing the ball quickly to the other team". This will puzzle anybody who's sat through the drawn-out rigmarole of both sides quitting the field and the sending on of two entirely different teams (while the crowd are distracted by clowns and dancing girls, Frisbee-catching dogs and mascots firing T-shirts out of bazookas). We also learn that American football is replete with the "underlining mythical structures" of "our Judeo Christian heritage", "our immigrant experience", "masculinity and violence" and "the romanticized storyline that Americans demand from their television sets every night". Which makes perfect sense — especially when you realise that America is the only country in the world with Jews, Christians, immigrants, men and television sets. How Football Explains America is a canard built on a false assumption based on a lazy anthropological cliché. The nonsensical idea that a sport could explain a nation started with the British who used cricket to explain why all foreigners are dirty cheating bastards. In the US, baseball has long served the same purpose. The game is uniquely American — goes the theory — because it is uniquely suited to and reflective of uniquely American qualities (and those qualities are, of course, absolutely marvelous). And now it's football's turn. "Football explains America," says NFL commissioner Roger Goodell on the book jacket, "because the game is about teamwork and camaraderie, competition and passion, strategy and emotion. You can look at football and see the heart of America." This is at least three different kinds of bollocks. 1) You could cut and paste "because the game is about steroids and growth hormones, antiquated gender roles, blatant sexism, a bloated bureaucracy and a veneer of politically correct corporate blandness" and the statement wouldn't be any more or less true. 2) The US is more passionate than Italy? Or more teamworky than, say, North Korea? 3) You could replace "football" with sudoko, darts or pornography and it would still be equally true (and equally meaningless). The entire book is an exercise in reverse engineered exceptionalism. America is the greatest country in the world therefore the things that make America great must be uniquely or especially American. And the things that are uniquely or especially American must therefore be great. As expected Paolantonio trots out the tired old canard that USAians don't play, watch, understand or appreciate soccer. He has to do this for his book to make any kind of sense. American football has failed in Europe and Japan, he says, despite millions of dollars spent on promotion. And this is true. And soccer has similarly failed to take root in the US, he says, therefore proving that there is something unique about America, and something uniquely American about American football. The problem is, of course, that soccer has in fact taken root in America and is played, watched, understood and appreciated by millions of Americans. Many of whom also like American football. Which means that American football no more explains America than spotted dick or the Eton wall game or crown green bowling or the "donkey choker" meat pie sandwich explains the English. It's just that nobody else likes the stuff. The poor benighted fools. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football
